Is Siri a threat to Google?

Google apparently is a little more worried than it let on that Apple’s Siri technology could pose a significant threat to the search giant. While Andy Rubin, head of Android, blew off Siri by saying a phone shouldn’t be an assistant, it seems like Google is wringing their hands a bit.

The blogosphere (I promise I will never use that word again) has been lighting up with questions about Siri’s impact on Google and why it could potentially threaten search as we — or Google — knows it. Google’s Eric Schmidt recently said “Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information,” and the way that Siri makes search ridiculously easy and (maybe more importantly) very natural takes things to a new level as far as the search game goes. Daniel Nolan, general manager at the Eword has also looked down the road a bit:

[quote]”However, it will be interesting to see how its popularity progresses once the initial novelty has worn off. It has more advanced voice recognition technology than that used by telephone banking and utilities companies to filter calls, but different people like to access information in different ways, so its ability to threaten Google may be limited – especially if Google chooses to develop a similar product.”[/quote]

And this would be the rub: Rubin (and others) are downplaying the impact of Siri for the transparent reason that they just don’t have something like it yet (and anyone who says “Android has voice recognition software” doesn’t know what Siri is, so don’t listen to them). But this won’t last. Google and Microsoft have clearly recognized that Siri is a major player in the tech world, and they will respond.

The question as to whether or not Siri is a threat to Google is very simple to establish once you answer the question, “How will Google respond?”